Disable clearing of boot messages
Related articles
After the boot process, the screen is cleared and the login prompt appears, leaving users unable to read init output and error messages. This default behavior may be modified using methods outlined in this article.
Note that regardless of the chosen option, kernel messages can be displayed for inspection after booting by using dmesg
or all logs from the current boot with journalctl -b
.
Using flow control
This is basic management that applies to most terminal emulators, including virtual consoles (vc):
- Press
Ctrl+S
to pause the output - And
Ctrl+Q
to resume it
Have boot messages stay on tty1
By default, arch has the getty@tty1
service enabled. The service file already passes --noclear
, which stops agetty from clearing the screen. However systemd clears the screen before starting it. To disable this behavior, create a drop-in directory /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/
and create a noclear.conf
file in it:
/etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/noclear.conf
[Service] TTYVTDisallocate=no
This overrides only TTYVTDisallocate
for agetty on TTY1 and let the global service file /usr/lib/systemd/system/getty@.service
untouched. This is the recommended way to edit systemd unit files.
Late KMS starting may still cause the first few boot messages to clear. If this is the case, try enabling early KMS start.
There will probably be too many boot messages to view on one screen. Use Shift+PgUp/PgDown to scroll. If there are too many boot messages you still might not be able to see all of them by scrolling. Try increasing the size of your scrollback buffer.
Disable clearing in /etc/issue
If you have an old /etc/issue
that has the "clear TTY" escape sequences, remove them.
# sed -i $'s/\e\[H//; s/\e\[2J//' /etc/issue